Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil lead as countdown continues

With fewer than 100 seats up for grabs in Ireland’s local elections, the two largest government parties are far ahead of their rivals.

Fine Gael leads with 223 councilors while Fianna Fáil has 210.

Independent candidates are doing well: between them they obtained 169 seats on the council.

The main opposition party, Sinn Féin, has won 92 seats so far, less than half of its government rivals and well short of its own target of 200.

Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald admitted she was “disappointed” by her party’s election results but confirmed she had done so. no plans to resign as party leader.

A total of 949 council seats are up for grabs in 31 local authorities.

The current Irish government has been in place since June 2020, when Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Green Party voted to form a coalition together.

Counting is also underway for the European Parliament elections and the Limerick City mayoral race.

Ireland has three European constituencies which send 14 MPs to Brussels, but none of these seats have yet been declared.

Fianna Fáil MEP Barry Andrews told BBC News NI’s Good Morning Ulster that local election results so far show there is “momentum for government parties”.

“It shows that there is broad satisfaction with what the government is doing,” he said.

“The fact that the center has stood firm is good news, especially considering what is happening across the EU, where there has been a massive growth of the far right.”

Fine Gael senator Emer Currie added it was a “good night for the party”.

“We offer stability, showing the importance of politics from the center and centrism. We invest in communities and people see it.

“There is enough room in the center for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.”

Meanwhile, Green Party leader Eamon Ryan told the BBC that government parties in general had “a successful campaign”.

However, he added that the Green Party would lose “a fair number of seats” in the local elections compared to its 2019 performance.

“We expected this because 2019 was really a turning point for environmental policy across Europe,” he said.

“But by holding on in many constituencies and having a chance of possibly winning two seats in the European elections, we remain very strong.”

By mid-morning Monday, the Greens had won 21 seats on the council.

Sinn Féin had hoped to have more councilors elected to local authorities than in previous local elections, but so far it has not got as many as it wanted.

Commentators have suggested the party presented too many candidates who scattered his voices too much.

There are also internal concerns within Sinn Féin that it has failed to explain its immigration policy clearly enough to the electorate.

Its leader, Ms McDonald, said she would lead a full review of Sinn Féin’s performance.

Sinn Fein TD Padraig MacLochlainn stressed that the party had “gained seats across the state, but not to the level we would have hoped”.

“The last local elections in 2019 were pretty disastrous for Sinn Fein,” he said.

“This election has always been about catching up. We haven’t regained as much ground as we would have liked.

Outside of the main parties, specific issues have brought new politicians to the forefront.

In County Donegal, the new 100% Redress party has fielded six candidates as part of its campaign to secure compensation for victims of the mica scandal.

He fights on behalf of homeowners whose homes are collapsing because they were built with faulty concrete blocks containing high levels of mica.

So far they won three council seats and are confident of getting a fourth.

Immigration was a major issue during the election campaign and in Dublin two prominent anti-immigration protesters won seats on the city council.

Independent candidate Malachy Steenson, who campaigned against housing asylum seekers in a former office block in Dublin’s East Wall area, was elected to represent the north inner city.

Gavin Pepper, who protested against several proposed migrant accommodation sites, was elected in the Ballymun-Finglas ward.

In Ireland, the more things change, the more things stay the same.

The current government party, Fine Gael, is now the largest party in local government, succeeding its government partner, Fianna Fáil.

As the count continues, the big story in Ireland is the success of independent candidates.

Non-party representatives of all stripes swept the boards, both in rural and urban areas. In Europe, a similar story happened.

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, both centrist parties, are likely to be the first MEPs announced to return to Brussels.

Sinn Féin, which was at one point tipped to shake up Ireland’s political scene, failed in its bid to take control of local councils, but could return to Europe with an MEP.

The party, once unassailable in political polls, fell as it struggled to confirm its position on immigration and housing for asylum seekers.

Their leader, Mary Lou McDonald, said “lessons will be learned” from the experience.

This is her second disappointing local and European election since taking over from Gerry Adams in 2018.

The Republic of Ireland uses a voting system called proportional representation (PR) for all of its elections.

Local councillors, TDs (Members of Irish Parliament); Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and even the Irish President are all elected via PR.

In the PR system, each voter has a single transferable vote (STV).

This means that in each constituency, citizens can vote for as many candidates as they wish on the ballot paper, indicating their choices in numerical order.

The PR-STV system means that if a voter’s preferred candidate is eliminated because they received too few first preference votes, those ballots can be redistributed to the remaining candidates, based on the voters’ second preference , And so on.

Additionally, if a candidate receives more votes than necessary to meet the electoral quota, their excess votes may be redistributed, according to voters’ preferences.

The advantages of the proportional representation electoral system, as opposed to simple first past the post, are that PR tends to give smaller parties and independents a better chance of winning seats against larger, more established parties.

It also gives voters more power over who represents them, because they can indicate alternative preferences if their first-choice candidate has little hope of winning.

But critics of the proportional representation system argue that it can lead to weak coalitions coming to power, rather than a government with a strong majority that could govern decisively.

They also argue that proportional representation allows parties to stay in power by forming new coalitions, even when their popularity has declined.